e new time, but we bear, all three of us, the
marks and liveries of the old.

I see myself, a dark, ill-dressed youth, with the bruise Lord Redcar
gave me still blue and yellow beneath my jaw; and young Verrall
sits cornerwise to me, better grown, better dressed, fair and quiet,
two years my senior indeed, but looking no older than I because of
his light complexion; and opposite me is Nettie, with dark eyes upon
my face, graver and more beautiful than I had ever seen her in the
former time. Her dress is still that white one she had worn when
I came upon her in the park, and still about her dainty neck she
wears her string of pearls and that little coin of gold. She is so
much the same, she is so changed; a girl then and now a woman--and
all my agony and all the marvel of the Change between! Over the end
of the green table about which we sit, a spotless cloth is spread,
it bears a pleasant lunch spread out with a simple equipage. Behind
me is the liberal sunshine of the green and various garden. I see
it all. Again I sit there, eating awkwardly, this paper lies upon
the table and Verrall talks of the Change.

"You can't imagine," he says in his sure, fine accents, "how much
the Change has destroyed of me. I still don't feel awake. Men of
my sort are so tremendously MADE; I never suspected it before."

He leans over the table toward me with an evident desire to make
himself perfectly understood. "I find myself like some creature
that is taken out of its shell--soft and new. I was trained to
dress in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, to think in
a certain way; I see now it's all wrong and narrow--most of it
anyhow--a system of class shibboleths. We were decent to each other
in order to be a gang to the rest of the world. Gentlemen indeed!
But it's perplexing------"

I can hear his voice saying that now, and see the lift of his
eyebrows and his pleasant smile.

He paused. He had wanted to say that, but it was not the thing we
had to say.

I leant forward a little and took hold of my glass very tightly.
"You two," I said, "will marry?"

They looked at one another.

Nettie spoke very softly. "I did not mean to marry when I came
away," she said.

"I know," I answered. I looked up with a sense of effort and met
Verrall's eyes.

He answered me. "I think we two have joined our lives. . . . But
the thing that took us was a sort of madness."

I nodded. "All passion," I said, "is madness." Then I fell into a